Great 2 paragraphs. But in your third, you're muddying the message we're trying to get out to AP. Let's get them to use the unit symbols correctly first instead of worrying about using megameters instead of kilometers. Not even in fully metric countries are megameters used, and asking any US entity to do so is really stretching it.
On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 2:28 PM, Pierre Abbat <[email protected]> wrote: > Here's my submission: > > Please use the correct symbols for international units. The symbols for > units > are set, according to an international treaty, by the CGPM; the AP does not > have power to set them. Two units commonly used with the wrong symbol are > the > kilometer per hour (km/h, not kph) and the microgram (µg, not mcg, not ug). > > When sources give measurements in metric units, such as the Chilean mine > accident 700 m underground, there is no need to convert them to units we > got > rid of over 30 years ago. When different sources use different units, you > should convert them all to metric for easy comparison. > > The metric system has prefixes for powers of 1000 up to 10^24. The average > American probably hasn't heard of a yottagram, but he has heard of a > gigabyte > and possibly a terabyte. Please use prefixes appropriately. I suggest 40 > Mm, > rather than 40,000 km, for the circumference of the earth and 150 Gm for > the > distance to the sun. > -- > I believe in Yellow when I'm in Sweden and in Black when I'm in Wales. > >
